Organising and storing photos. Advice please!

[Bennie Boy]

Like most people nowadays I have thousands of photos. They are currently stored either on my iphone or on a fairly old PC.

I'm interested to know what options I have to sort and store my photos. I will probably getting rid of my old PC so I have to do something.

I'm thinking of getting software that will sort through my photos, removing duplicates and then storing them probably on icloud.

Has anyone done anything similar?

Thanks in advance,

Ben

 

[DJDave87]

Ive just downloaded Amazon Photos app to get the free £7. Further details below.

£7 Credit (Off a £25 Spend) (Selected Accounts) when you back up your photos with Amazon Photos for Amazon Prime - hotukdeals

If you’ve got Amazon Prime, simply click the link, download the photo app and get a £7 Amazon credit. You'll receive your credit within seven days.Get a £7 Amaz

www.hotukdeals.com

Looks like it could be pretty handy but not checked it out properly yet. I imagine long term either limits on the storage amount or a tiered costing might be brought in. Either that or its designed to make cancelling prime more and more difficult to do.

I wouldnt put it all on cloud so would either regularly back up to local storage or back up to cloud from local storage.

 

[Bennie Boy]

Thanks for the heads up!

 

[snerkler]

I've just sorted all mine manually into folders for specific years then specific 'events' and backed up onto two external drives.

 

[BT Bob]

I wouldn't trust all my photos to one method.
Currently, I have them all stored on an external HDD, and the very important ones (I used to shoot weddings, so have loads of them) on DVD-R discs, which are duplicated and the guy who was my partner shooting them has the copies (and I have his copies).
I addition I have them on Google Drive.
I've looked at a number of cloud storage options for all my data backup, but yet to find something suitable (and suitably priced).

 

[wongataa]

Organisation is best done with DAM (digital asset management) software.

I use the management tools in Adobe Lightroom Classic as that is also my main photo editor. There are DAM tools that are not tied to any photo editor if that is they way you prefer.

What you need to do first is decide on a filing system. I use year folders (2021, 2020, etc) and dated sub folders in those year folders. A photo taken on Feb 3rd 2010 would be in a folder whose path is as follows: \Photos\2021\2021-02-03\

If you use the date format yyyy-mm-dd files/folders automatically sort in date order.

Once you have copied all the photos into one location in your preferred folder system then further organisation is done in the DAM software. Give the photos keywords. It will take time doing it from scratch but if you do a few at a time you will eventually build up a nice keyword list and have everything with at least some basic keywords. I tend only give photos I actually edit more comprehensive keywords.

Now you can easily find photos by using keyword searches and and use other ways of cataloguing based on photo metadata and you don't have to root through lots of folders finding things.

Make sure everything is backed up regularly. I use external hard disks for local backups and I use an online backup service - Backblaze - for backing everything up in the cloud.

 

[12harry]

Not just Photos ! - Vids and digital Art, , 3D designs...etc.
. . . . This is a topic that needs care and trust... e.g. digital photo formats can be lost as can discs and the software to read them.
I suspect HDD are about as reliable as one can reasonably expect. although the "Cloud" has technical back-up, there is no G'tee it will survive a world-wide hacking, for example.
If your HDDs are in a RAID case that "should" confer some L-T benefits.... but finding somewhere to keep this unit could be problematic . Obviously: away from excess heat, lightning, flood, theft. fire. etc. but these are v.difficult to overcome - - - as is failure of the RAID motherboard in the casing. This might suggest two Raid set-ups using different Manufacturers. . . . so their MTBF are totally skewed.
Searching for the necessary photo is quite separate, IMHO - but any software (or Cloud)solution has L-T risks - and significant Cost, in perpetuity. .... as does checking your RAID boxes.

Good Luck - Keep us informed...

 

[rpr]

I save my photos to two seperate NAS drives

 

[newbie1]

@Bennie Boy lots of good options already in the thread. Essentially on your own disk or nas, or a cloud option.

Storing is maybe the easiest step, it's the sorting and organizing to find what you need that is difficult if you haven't been doing that as you have gone along. I found this list of tools that I'm going to check out as I have a similar problem Best Photo Management Software 2021: Digital Picture Image Organizer

However I expect I'll take the same route as @snerkler and do it manually not sure I trust the algorithms.

 

[low-def.]

This is something i'm looking at right now. I have family photo's going back 15-20 years on my laptop and stored on an ex HDD, but i want to upload them to a cloud service as a back up.

I have saved many photo's in Google Photo's in the past of things taken on my phone - which is now taken up 6gb of the 15gb free allowance on google photo's.

Seeing as i will need more to copy over the thousands on the laptop, would it be worth paying for a service like iCloud, Amazon or Google?

If so, does one really have a big advantage over the other?

 

[Ugg10]

Ok, so I have -

Original set on my PC Harddrive, all photos RAW and JPG plus edited photos.
Back up done approx monthly on NAS
Back up done about every three months on usb drive stored in fire safe
JPG files stored on Flickr - easy to access and share.

All organised in Events > Year > activity, plus other folders for family, garden, cars, projects, house, misc bits Etc.

Phones and iPads auto upload to Flickr.

 

[oneman]

I'm looking for same thing for a Windows PC. I have about 50,000 photos in one directory with probably about 50 sub-directories but no real organisation. Some are from digital cameras, some from phones. Would like to be able to read and index EXIP info if possible though not all the photos have it. Plus the photos have been moved several times so create and last change in Windows aren't accurate enough.

Most of the photos are now in my Google photos account but its not great at reading metadata.

I've had a look at Picajet but it just crashes when I try and search by date.

 

[Squirty]

I save my photos to two seperate NAS drives

Same, Have used the Qnap Photo station and it does a reasonable job of sorting the files. The face recognition software isn't too bad either.

 

[anotheruser]

There's quite a few re-namers out there that can take the exif data and rename the file to fit in with mobile phone naming scheme, ie IMG_yyyymmdd_hhmmss.

I organise mine into folders like: "yyyy\yyyy.mm.dd — event name" if it was a particular trip or event. Any generic photos just stay in the year folder.

So...

2018\2018.06.12 - Trip to London
2018\2018.09.23 - Secret Holiday Trip
2021\2021.01.01 - New Years Day Walk
2021\2021.03.24 - Visit to the Zoo

 

[Ugg10]

If you name then yyyy.mm.dd+descriptor then they will always be in date order when you order them by name

 

[AMc]

If you name then yyyy.mm.dd+descriptor then they will always be in date order when you order them by name

Good advice - it's really irritating if you copy your collection on to a new computer and the file date is updated. All my files (not just photos) use this naming convention

 

[wongataa]

Yes yyyy-mm-dd is the superior date format. Proper sorting by default and no confusion about dates due to different countries conventions.

 

[Reese Withouterspoon]

I'm fairly terrified to even venture into this discussion, given that I don't have the foggiest idea what many of you are even talking about... but I have been contemplating the issue of photo storage myself recently. Currently I store all my photos on my laptop and although I do have an external hard drive, I no longer use it as I can never work out how to only save my photos on it. It always seems to try to back up my entire laptop... so I have given up on it.

I have a lot of very old family photos which I have digitised, as well as more recent photos, such as those taken on holidays. It would be nice to be able to have something a bit more portable in order to be able to show photos to other people. I can see that it is possible to buy digital photo frames which will hold a limited number of images but I suspect that this would be nowhere near large enough for my needs. It would be handy to have a dedicated device for all my photographs. Is it possible to buy what I suppose is in effect a digital photo album, which would allow me to store and display all my photos - but nothing else?

Sadly, I'm a bit of a twit when it comes to understanding how much storage space a device has and it would be more meaningful to know how many photos I might be able to store, rather than having it cited in KB, MB or GBs.

Hopefully someone might be able to offer some handy advice. Thanks in advance.

 

[johnmc]

I have a copy of photos on 2 drives on local machine and a copy on the nas , (in the garage) also a copy in google photos, ~140,000 photos , and they take up 1.5TB these are a mix of raw and jpeg ,
i have kept my original file format , i have a folder for year , then sub folder for month , all photos for the month are kept here , unfortunately its a bit of a nightmare trying to find a specific event , thats where the copy on google comes in , or if i was feeling particularly nerdy i may have inserted keywords to the exif .. (very seldom )

 

[12harry]

Post #19 - you are not alone:- it seems every gadget wants to sell you their sizzle, but conveniently forgets how you will create the "Back-Office" - Look at User-Manuals and see all the stupid effects you can apply to photos, etc. - yet there's no mention of a decent filing system.
HDD are ( Still, IMHO), the most reliable back-up, provided they are not abused. After many years they will fail, so you need a second one to copy the contents as a back-up. +Store them separately.
If a HDD has lasted 5-years - it needs to be copied....like yesterday.
The good thing is that storage-cost is falling.
Many Ext-Drives came with software to "help" but I find them confusing - and they will change in a year anyway. Sadly PCs are not organised to be helpful - they appear to enjoy making it difficult as do the suppliers of "bare" HDDs - isn't it time they were Formatted? We can change the format later but I'd like to see my new drive is working first. Grr.

Good Luck.

 

[iansimpson888]

i'm probably just going to repeat what has already been said, but if you need another opinion....

RAW images
1. catalogued and organised in Adobe Lightroom Classic
2. edited RAW images exported as jpeg to Google Drive (200GB @ £2.50 month)
3. original RAW files & catalogue files etc backed up each night using iDrive (10TB of data @ $99 year)

workstation
1. all drives (whole system, OS and data) backed up each night using iDrive (10TB of data @ $99 year)

snaps (phone images, point & shoot, etc)
1. stored on device
2. synced to google photo's
3. phone backed up using iDrive (10TB of data @ $99 year)

whilst approx £10 a month is certainly more than some of the free options out there, it works for me. RAW files (especially merged shots) and video certainly eat through those free allowances. but i make use of Google Photos for the everyday stuff. It has tools for detecting duplicates etc, which has helped tidy things up for me. Plus i like the little notifications that it sends, showing you old pics etc.

Then i use iDrive for the heavy lifting. It is a like for like backup of whatever you throw at it. I've got 9TB of storage on my workstation, so essentially any device has a copy on the device, on the PC and on the cloud.

The only risk i see is that at some point the subscription would increase. However the market is so competitive that i'm confident that prices will stay affordable.

Along with the peace of mind, I also don't have to faff about with stuff anymore. The only manual tasks I have are the exported jpeg files to Google Drive, but that is simply a drag and drop of a folder to the cloud - and wait until it completes. In reality, it's overkill - as the jpegs usually end up on Flickr, or somewhere else, and are backed up via iDrive too.

Sorry, finally, if you don't fancy having to upload a shedload of data during the initial setup of iDrive, you can pay for them to send you an external harddrive, which has some tools to backup all the required data, and you ship it back to them. it took me an evening (+through the night) to do this, but it is an unattended task, so it's just a case of waiting for it to complete. Your mileage may vary depending on speed of disks/amount of data, naturally. The drive ships from the US, by UPS i think - so was pretty quick, but you may need to pay import taxes initially. This can be claimed back though as you are not importing goods - they are here temporarily, but it wasn't a deal breaker for me in the grand scheme of things.

Hope that helps

 

[Ilovewaffles]

I tried to upload photos to google drive from my PC. In pictures, I went away leaving them to upload, as it was going to take a long time, but when I came back, there was nothing to show the upload was complete or not. Some were fine but when I clicked on some it came up with Picasa image and it wouldn’t open , (photos are stored in both picasa and photos. ) saying no preview available. Wish I had done it bit my bit instead of trying to do the lot in one go! I there a problem with picasa?